The collaboration between Baan and Microsoft in the ERP-office software market space has opened significant market opportunities for companies active in ERP, says Ron Behrmann, MD of CS TSA, the Baan specialist in the JSE-listed CS Holdings group.
Baan expects to be the first enterprise applications vendor to offer its customers the benefits of integration between a full customer management product suite and sophisticated touch points to Office 2000.
"Competitive practices keep raising the bar for knowledge workers in all industries," says Behrmann. "Companies supporting these workers are demanding increasingly powerful software tools to harness existing enterprise data and speed decision-making.
"The combination of Office 2000 and Baan applications will help connect knowledge workers with people and information across enterprises."
Customers want more informed decision-making benefits from using Office and Baan applications together, adds Behrmann. "The synergy between Office 2000 and Baan applications is highlighted in such solutions as the BaanFrontOffice suite of customer management applications. BaanFrontOffice relies on key Office applications such as Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and Outlook to deliver business information to users. It uses Internet Explorer to provide a familiar interface. The integration between BaanFrontOffice and Office 2000 reduces training and deployment times."
BaanFrontOffice users can employ Office 2000 for immediate access to key customer metrics. For instance, sales representatives can use pre-packaged reports and the user interface of Excel to query and manipulate data directly from BaanFrontOffice, while more complex reporting and data analysis is provided by Baan Enterprise Decision Manager (Baan EDM) using SQL Server OLAP Services. In addition, BaanFrontOffice uses Outlook to push contact and schedule information to Outlook users who are not necessarily BaanFrontOffice users.
These integration touch points enable Office applications to act as an "application portal" to the business knowledge available in Baan applications, notes Behrmann.
"Office 2000 documents also play a role in distribution of critical marketing and sales information to the field," adds Behrmann.
"BaanKnowledgeManager takes advantage of Office documents by organising and distributing content to all users of the application across the organisation, providing instant access to information relevant to each customer interaction.
"Since business users are very familiar with Office applications, using Baan applications and Office together makes it easy for users to adapt to today`s knowledge-driven work environment," says Behrmann. "Beyond just increased productivity, these workers continue to use the desktop components they are familiar with while improving and optimising key business processes in all areas: manufacturing, operations, supply chain, and customer relationship management."
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